Backyard Birds – Part 8

Written By Sasha Kopf

After I finished the background, I started working on the birds that would be flying around the bird feeder.

These took me a long time to make and caused me a lot of frustration. In particular, the cardinal’s tail took me about a week to get right.

At first, I tried making my own veneer by stacking different colors of veneer on each other, gluing them, and then cutting cross sections.

Photograph of strips of veneer. Each strip is composed of a brownish-pink wood, white wood, and dark red wood.

Then I cut the cross sections at a slight angle.

Photograph of the same strips of veneer, this time cut at an angle so that they are compressed at the top and fan out at the bottom

That looked okay, but it was a little stiff and unnatural.

Photograph of the veneer above attached to a marquetry cardinal

So I cut off the tail and tried again. It took me at least a dozen attempts to get the angles of the feathers right, but I was eventually happy with the result.

Photograph of the same marquetry cardinal with a new tail, this time comprised of only two colors

I had similar problems making the wings of the sparrows, but nothing was quite as frustrating as the cardinal’s tail.

Photograph of a marquetry sparrow in progress
Photograph of a different marquetry sparrow in progress
Sasha Kopf
Previous

Backyard Birds – Part 9
Next

Backyard Birds – Part 7